Una de las creencias de nuestra sociedad que más aprecia es que las relaciones son complicadas. No sólo a las relaciones románticas, o bien - todo relationships are fraught with intractable complexities. Watch any movie, read any novel, and you’ll begin to believe that even the best relationships are balancing on the edge...

We were trained to believe that we are empty or broken, and if we can just get someone to give us what we are missing, we would be happy. Then we must control our supposed source of good so that person will keep doing the things that make us feel loved.

Many humans are using their business as a way to avoid an intimate relationship with their hearts and to somehow bypass having loving relationships with others. The mind plays a big role in this roller coaster game of keeping you in complexity, in a whirlwind of activity and mental jabber. So it is your choice to come out of feeling like a victim of your societies, systems, and businesses.

Demographers frequently remind us that the United States is a rapidly aging country. From 2010 to 2040, we expect that the age-65-and-over population will more than double in size, from about 40 to 82 million.

I never remember being held when I would cry. I was always sent to my room. It was incredibly lonely to be crying alone. I felt as if no one understood me and I had the horrible feeling that there must be something very wrong with me.

My family and my community are just as much “me” as the organs of my body. My body and mind, my family and my community, are interacting and interpenetrating—variously prevalent elements in the network of relations that encompasses all things in nature and the human world.

Couples often trade responsibility for their Inner Children. They project their disowned feelings on each other and riddle the relationship with unrealistic expectations and displaced anger. When you unwittingly hand your deepest longings over to your partner, you abandon your Inner Child all over again.

All good communication boils down to following four simple rules. Abiding by them, anyone can communicate about any topic effectively and lovingly. There are also four opposing violations that create the misunderstandings and ensuing hurt, alienation and confusion that we experience when communicating with others.

How much more meaningful would our moments with loved ones be if we treated them as if this might be our last time together? We would not squabble over petty issues. We would remember what’s important. Un Curso de Milagros tells us that the world we see is inside out and upside down.

We can probably all relate to the experience of feeling divided within ourselves, occasionally against ourselves, and love will certainly induce this as handily as any of life’s experiences. A little-known fact about Cupid may help explain this. He is said to have carried in his quiver dos kinds of arrows, one struck you with love, the other with hate.

Do you take the people you love for granted? Do you just assume they will always be there? Do you tell them often enough that you love and care about them, or do you feel there is no need as they probably already know?

A new study finds quantitative evidence of love—something very few economic studies have ever claimed. The researchers asked married couples two penetrating questions about the quality of their marriage, and combined those responses with the couples’ divorce rates six years later.

Children come in all shapes and sizes, but not with a manual. Childhood achievements such as walking and talking are often celebrated signs that things are going well in a child’s life. However, once these achievements start being compared between children (at the park, on Facebook) they can become the cause of anxiety.

Written by Maddie Blackburn, The Open University and Sarah Earle, The Open University

Until the last decade, many young people with a life-limiting or life-threatening condition were not expected to live into adulthood. Now improvements in medicine and technology have changed all that for children with conditions such as duchenne muscular or spinal muscular atrophy which cause serious degeneration of muscles and nerves, or genetic disorders, such as cystic fibrosis.

The Collins English Dictionary unveiled a thoroughly modern concept as its word of the year for 2015: binge watching. It usually refers to consuming endless hours of movies or series on Netflix, one after the other. But binge watching is about the more fundamental issue of the world’s obsession with content consumption.

Sixteen years after they published their formal recommendations discouraging any form of screen time before age two – and 14 years after making recommendations to limit screen time for older children to no more than two hours per day – they are now recanting those recommendations, calling them “outdated.”

Disciplining works if it is not over the top and children understand the point of it. Highlights magazine’s annual State of Kids survey found that a majority of children appreciated being disciplined and believed that it helped them behave better.

A common view is that students learn maths best when teachers give clear explanations of mathematical concepts, usually in isolation from other concepts, and students are then given opportunities to practise what they have been shown.

In a study titled “Stress in America,” commissioned by the American Psychological Association, it was found that 30 percent of teens reported feeling overwhelmed, depressed, or sad as a result of stress. Almost 25 percent said they skipped meals because of stress. Almost one-third of teens say that stress often brings them to the verge of tears...

By the time they are teenagers, more than two-thirds of young people are not doing enough physical activity. Teenagers spend an average of eight hours every day sitting, with 11 to 15-year-olds watching nearly three hours of television.

A stagnant nation, despairing over the death of education . . . by the Great Cat, why? Have we not learned that school kills? The nation ought to be raving joyful for the death of its failed system of diplomas and degrees, raving delighted at the greening of this grand new culture, the Passionate Self-Educated.

Recent research suggests success is partly driven by character skills. “Grit,” for example, or perseverance and passion for long-term goals, seems to be a better predictor of success than IQ in school and beyond.

Written by Alex Jensen, Brigham Young University and Susan M McHale, Pennsylvania State University

A colleague related the following story: while running errands with her 11- and 7-year-old daughters, a back seat battle began to rage. My colleague’s attempts to diffuse the situation only led to a shouting match about who was to blame for the skirmish. Finally the 11-year-old proclaimed to her sister, “You started it the day you were born and took away Mom’s love!”

A couple of years ago, I taught an afterschool class at a Seattle nonprofit, the Technology Access Foundation (TAF), which provides STEM education (science, technology, engineering, math) to children from less-privileged backgrounds. My students were 8-11 years old, and it was the first time that I had taught elementary school students.

A new study is the first in more than 20 years to look at long-term outcomes after early intensive autism intervention. Therapy began when children were 18 to 30 months old and involved therapists and parents working with children at home for more than 15 hours each week for two years.

Some parents think it’s their job to make their children happy and to think for them – but this is not true. It’s not the parents’ job to think for their children or to make them happy. It’s impossible for one human being to think for another human being or to make another human being happy.

In March 2015, San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland shocked football fans when he announced his decision to retire after just one season in the NFL. He explained that he was concerned over the long-term health hazards of football-related head trauma, and journalists and media personalities covered the story extensively.

On asking six-year-olds why water flows down a mountain, one of the responses I received was, “because then we don’t have to walk up the mountain to get it”. Children of this age often conceptualise the world’s physical attributes as being divined for the service of humans, or even just for them.

At the end of the school year, districts often send stacks of books home with their students in the hopes of combating the “summer slide” in reading skills. This type of literacy loss hits low-income students particularly hard.

Research has shown that children of poorer parents display substantially worse math and reading skills by the time they start grade school. Other studies have revealed that these wide gaps in pre-school skills persist into adulthood and help explain low educational attainment and lifetime earnings.

When we think of reading for our children, we are often misled into thinking that we need to focus on one type of book, such as picture books or novels in order to practise specific, reading-related skills. However, this narrowly-focused approach to reading instruction can often have undesirable benefits, such as turning kids off reading altogether.

Narcissistic children feel superior to others, believe they are entitled to privileges and crave admiration from others. When they don’t get the admiration they want, they may lash out aggressively. Why do some children become narcissistic, whereas others develop more modest views of themselves?

A lot of previous investigación has suggested that young people living in single-mother households are at an educational disadvantage. But our new study looking at the lives of 10,000 teenagers suggests that this is not true. A stable family, even if it is a lone-parent one, is the best place to grow up.

Many parents are moving towards “gentle parenting”, where they choose not to use rewards (sticker charts, lollies, chocolates, TV time as “bribes”) and punishments (taking away “privileges”, time-out, smacking) to encourage good behaviour, but encourage good behaviour for the sake of doing the right thing.

Children learn to lie from about the age of two. The first lies children learn to tell are denials of wrongdoing. From the age of three they also learn to tell “white” lies. But what can we do to encourage children to tell the truth?

Why does a four-year-old play when a 14-year-old creates? It’s often argued that play is central to the lives of young children. Yet the play of older children and adults is often seen as leisure, escapism or even deviance. But there should not be such a binary division between what is educational and what is frivolous.

As a family therapist, I often have the impulse to tell families to go home and have dinner together rather than spending an hour with me. And 20 years of research in North America, Europe and Australia back up my enthusiasm for family dinners. It turns out that sitting down for a nightly meal is great for the brain, the body and the spirit.

I can remember like yesterday sitting at the dinner table as a child with my parents and siblings and feeling like the world was going to end. My parents would openly discuss current events. I thought to myself what will be in this world? How will I be safe? What can the future look like when these terrible things are happening all the time?

A new study finds a link between a good night’s sleep for school-aged kids and better performance in math and languages specifically—subjects that are powerful predictors of later learning and academic success.

Indigos process their emotions differently than non Indigos because they have high self-esteem and strong integrity. They can read you like an open book and quickly notice and neutralize any hidden agendas or attempts to manipulate them, however subtly.

Teenagers' opinions about when violence is acceptable or not can be influenced by the way they perceive men and women and the relationships between them. Simply telling young people that violence is wrong won’t stop it happening.

To examine a person’s difficulties is to enter into the psychological atmosphere of his or her family. We are marked by their characteristics, but also by their insane ideas, their negative feelings, their inhibited desires, and their destructive acts. All problems have their roots in the family tree.

When the six-year-old showed his drawing to the grownups in his life, instead of seeing a boa constrictor digesting an elephant, they thought it was a drawing of a hat. Whenever he showed it to adults, he received the same response. The youngster concluded that none of the grownups had any imagination at all!

As you experience being an earth angel, you will discover that the path of service is riddled with deep feelings. We are in service at all times, and we need to set an example to other earth angels. If you are living with dysfunction, and your life is not in balance, you need to seek out a teacher and heal within. We cannot serve others when we are ourselves are out of balance.

Core values are the things in our lives that we live from that are nonnegotiable. They are at the heart of who we are, and they need to resonate with our heart’s energy. If they don’t, they are not our values but belong to someone else.

What makes you break your diet, or run up your credit card, or be attracted to all the wrong people? Each of us has self-sabotaging tendencies, the origins of which elude us. Be confused no longer! I’m here to tell you that these behaviors are attributable to a part of your personality that perhaps you didn’t even know you had: your Outer Child.

Our biographies are truly ours to play with, and it is our responsibility to take care with how we do this. If, for instance, you tell yourself an old story that revolves around the notion that no matter what you do, “that’s just the way it is,” and the ending will always be the same, the universe will eventually show you exactly that.

In my years of working with clients and their karmic history, I have chosen to take the meaning of karma out of the duality, that is, the belief that doing good brings good things, doing bad brings bad things. Instead, I use a deeper spiritual meaning of karma—its role as the unresolved emotional wounds...

A website or any new profession, relationship, or step ahead in life is an excellent projective test for where your consciousness lives at the moment. Since life is more about what’s going on dentro de you rather than what’s going on outside, the best use of outside is to shine light on the inside, so you can progress in your soul’s journey.

En una entrevista en The Oprah Winfrey Show, Jane Fonda revealed that it wasn’t until after she turned sixty that she realized one of life’s most important secrets: She had to give up her incessant desire to be perfect so that she could begin to experience herself as whole.

We all carry some degree of self-blame, ways we accuse or condemn ourselves. Often these feelings come from our childhood, where we were blamed for mistakes we made. It’s sad how other people’s blame of us can turn into our blame of ourselves, which then often becomes our secret shame, and can keep us from the happiness we want...

Written by Sarah Gomillion, Postdoctoral research fellow in social psychology, University of Aberdeen

At the beginning of a romantic relationship, passion is not in short supply. The thrills of learning all about your beloved, sharing new experiences, and having plenty of sex, create an exhilarating state of desire and romantic love. In fact, a number of scientific studies have shown that this kind of love

“Selfie” is not just word of the year, but also the mainstay of postings on social media sites such as Instagram. With the prevalence of camera-equipped smartphones the posting of selfies has reached epidemic levels – even the funerals of national leaders aren’t exempt. But is there a psychological fall-out?

A friend once grumbled that, given the choice, she’d rather see her ex miserable than herself happy. Few things in life are as traumatic as the end of a long-term, romantic relationship. Nonetheless, many people are able to eventually recover and move on relatively unscathed.

These two core issues (or negative messages from childhood) often meet and interact with one another, sometimes in disastrous ways. Usually the carriers of these issues are more or less unaware of them.

The term “wild animals” can conjure up images of unruly beasts desperately attempting to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving world. Vicious scuffles between reckless baboons as they contend for dominance.

Our online survey responses suggest that people can find love at anytime. But, when we ask single people from all walks of life if they feel they can find true love, the answers we receive have been quite the opposite.

I started thinking, “Do all wives feel like they are raising their husbands? Wow. Someone should write a book about that.” Weeks later the title How to Raise a Husby popped into my head, and it occurred to me that, as a wife and a writer, I could write a book about wives and husbands.

Let’s face it breakups hurt. Why? Well, for the most part it’s painful because it represents a loss. And, I’m not just talking about the loss of a loved one, but of the dream that you thought you once shared. Often this sense of a letdown is followed by stress and grief.

Some couples seem blessed with everlasting love. Then, there’s the rest of us—who start running into trouble once the honeymoon is over. We encounter differences, disagreements, dis-appointments. Buttons get pushed. And communication breaks down as issues become increasingly hard to resolve.

As a counselor to couples for many years, I’ve learned to spot the distinctive stages we travel through over the course of an intimate relationship. Although these stages are predictable, even inevitable, we have the power to choose how to travel through them as self-aware actors who are in charge of our lives.

Relationships seem to be about partner matching. Therefore the apparent robustness of sex differences in preferences may largely be an artifact of the focus on sex at the expense of other more meaningful variables.

My favorite fairy tale as a child was Cinderella, so when I met Charlie and fell in love with him, I thought my prince had come. But these kinds of fantasies are a setup for expectations that are impossible to fulfill, and when they don’t get fulfilled...

Two points emerge from our troubles during this stage. The first is the incorrect belief that our happiness and the success of the relationship are determined by what our partner says and does. As I’ve emphasized before and will again, all relationship change begins within you...

For all that Miley Cyrus’s cropped hair and crotch-clutching and “I don’t relate to being boy or girl” have inspired articles about gender fluidity as the new “in” thing, it’s hard not to see Cyrus’s “trailblazing” as derivative of David Bowie – a true icon in so many ways, not least in his defiant smashing of gender norms.

The “gaze” is a term that describes how viewers engage with visual media. Originating in film theory and criticism in the 1970s, the gaze refers to how we look at visual representations. These include advertisements, television programs and cinema.

The current sexual and reproductive prevention methods have significantly improved the health and well-being of women and their families. But this is not enough. Worldwide each year there are still 85 million unplanned pregnancies, 21.6 million unsafe abortions, and nearly 300 000las muertes maternasfrom complications related to pregnancy and birth.

It’s not often you see people over-50 having sex on screen. It’s so rare, in fact, that the sex scenes in 45 Years, the recent film about the approaching anniversary of a retired couple, became one of the main talking points in its coverage.

A new exhibition at the British Museum promises to lift the lid on what beauty meant for the ancient Greeks. But while we gaze at the serene marble statues on display – straining male torsos and soft female flesh – are we seeing what the ancients saw?

It’s often thought that we are hardwired by eons of natural selection to be attracted to particular physical traits; that preference is thought to guide a search for healthy mates to help us produce healthy offspring. But the study by Yang and Leonard Lee of the National University of Singapore challenges the notion that our inborn ideas of physical attractiveness are immutable.

Traditional Native American societies may be the best models of balanced societies in existence today—with only about 500 years of European contact and assimilation, versus 2,000 years. Native people viewed themselves—not their political, social, or reli­gious lives—as individuals. The names that Native groups gave themselves generally translated to “the People” or “human beings.”

Someone once gave Barry and I a small yellow button to wear that says, “You never need to defend or justify your feelings.” I love the message on this button and, though I don’t wear it, I keep it in my desk so it is the first thing I see when I open the drawer. This little message has helped me over and over again...

Many of our "life lessons" come to us through what we might usually call a "negative" experience, or possibly a "negative" person in our life. However, the addition of the term negative to any person or situation is simply a perception, or a judgment, on our part.

Chances are you’ve seen and heard an emotional manipulator at work. Perhaps you even live or work with someone who regularly pulls out their blame gun and sprays accusations on everyone but themselves. They get angry and indignant and go on and on about how stupid, ineffective, or lame others are.

Statistics show that people who live solitary lives don’t live as long as those who enjoy deep and meaningful connections with family and friends. Each step you take to vanquish the fear that is holding you back will add more years to your life, and perhaps, more life to your years.

It’s really important to be able to name your control patterns and fear buttons and accept them as part of the human condition. Each item in the list below describes a behavior. Identifying the behaviors that you exhibit will help you notice when you are using a control pattern. Then you can choose your response rather than reacting automatically.

For a good marriage, who is the most important person with whom you should be communicating well? If you think it’s your spouse, think again. The most important person to converse with constructively is yourself! You need not try to resolve every situation by talking it over with your partner.

What keeps us prisoners of our illusions? Our assumptions—the things we believe are true that really are not. For example, on my way to work during rush hour, a guy in a Lexus speeds by, cuts in front of me, then weaves in and out of traffic at a hundred miles an hour. My first reaction is...

If we want to make the world a better place, we need to work on having healthy boundaries! And by this I mean… we understand that I am me and you are you and that each of us has a right to be here and to choose and experience the consequences of all our thoughts, words and actions.

In the social world, we are constantly gathering information through visual cues that we use to evaluate others’ behavior. Babies do the same thing. Babies as young as 13 months know how people should treat each other—and recognize when nasty replaces nice.

I don’t believe we ever “master” the art of learning to communicate effectively. But we do get more skilled at witnessing ourselves and making new choices. One note of caution: Speaking your truth does not mean you always say everything you are thinking.

Growing up I had a lot of trouble distancing myself from other people's problems. I had every aspect of the Savior Complex embedded in my cells. It was this natural-born Savior Complex which resulted in a lot of drama in my life.

For years, friendships between straight women and gay men have been a subject of pop culture fascination. Books, television shows and feature length films have all highlighted this unique relationship, noted for its closeness and depth.

In his first interview as Prime Minister with The Today Show on Monday, Malcolm Turnbull responded to questions about increased funding for women escaping family violence by declaring “real men don’t hit women”.

Long before the invention of Facebook and Match.com, our ancestors grappled with how to improve their social lives, forge beneficial connections, and strengthen their reputations. Their insights will help us enhance our social lives, extend our online social networks, and lead to greater opportunities for success.

Is he or she the one? You know… the one to introduce to my parents, the one to move in with, the one to start a family with, the one to marry? At some point in every dating relationship, you ask yourself some version of these questions.

Many people dread family get-togethers even if they really do love each other. We see this happening often – maybe you’ve even had this experience yourself and wonder why it’s so difficult. You really do love these people after all.

Written by Kelsey Hegarty and Kirsty Forsdike, University of Melbourne

At first glance, Victoria Police’s suggestion this week that health professionals report domestic violence to authorities, as they do for child abuse, sounds like a great idea. The suggestion was made in its submission to the state’s Royal Commission into Family Violence.

If we don’t see ourselves as worthwhile contributors to society and we don’t approach our aging with dignity and respect for ourselves, how can we expect them to see us that way? As we age, our families become helpful and supportive, or neglectful and critical...